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Super Mario Run Is Coming To Ios On December 15

I've been a bit outspoken when it comes to PC ports. In fact I was downright harsh in 2014. When a year of gaming sins was highlighted by the Watch Dogs mess and then exacerbated by a sloppy, bug-ridden Assassin's Creed Unity, I called for a boycott of the publisher's PC games. It's remarkable how dramatically Ubisoft has turned it around, and the PC version of The Division finds the publisher understanding their intended audience and giving PC gamers the experience they expect.

The Division Main Menu | PC Screenshot

What experience is that exactly? A great PC version of a multiplatform game is about respecting the player's investment, and understanding the reasons they're buying your game on PC. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think there are four basic pillars PC ports should strive to uphold:

The Division on PC checks all these boxes and then goes the extra mile by baking in features that feel like pure luxury compared to most PC port treatments.

One of several screens in The Division for tweaking graphics quality

Turn All The Dials

The wealth of options at your disposal for tweaking the graphics in The Division is borderline absurd. The staples like overall quality presets, V-Sync, and Ambient Occlusion are here, but there are also sliders for image sharpening and volumetric fog. Do you want sub-surface scattering with that? How about snow that reacts realistically to the wind? Want to pour on some lens flare and a vignette effect? Have at it! Or don't!

Control The Game With Your Eyeballs

Ubisoft has once again embraced Tobii EyeX technology (as they did with Assassin's Creed Syndicate) with The Division, and the tech is downright exciting. I'm using a SteelSeries Sentry mounted on my monitor, and the device enables shockingly accurate eye tracking both in-game and in the main map.

Eye tracking in The Division with a SteelSeries Sentry | Photo by Jason Evangelho

So this means I can open up the world map and simply look at the various icons I want to interact with instead of scrolling to them. During gameplay, I just gaze at the cover I want to move to and then select it instead of using the camera navigation to do so, which is a much faster process and obviously intuitive process since you're already using your eyes to scan the area. How about aiming your grenade with merely a glance? Yep. Another subtle but incredibly appreciated feature is HUD dimming. If I'm not looking directly at my minimap or other HUD elements, they fade out and open up more screen real estate. Snap your gaze over to them and they immediately light up again.

And we're not talking about making deliberate movements -- or any movements at all -- with your head. Just the natural movement of your eyes. The tracking capabilities are creepily accurate, and I sincerely hope more developers start adopting this admittedly expensive but downright innovative tech.

Meaningful Dual Monitor Support

While not as groundbreaking or uncommon as eye tracking, The Division also has meaningful dual monitor support.

Let's say you have a pair of 1080p monitors. You use your AMD or Nvidia control panels to stitch them into a single display (so for example a resolution of 3840 x 1080), then switch on the game's dual monitor feature. Now you not only have a very ultrawide display, but you can customize the HUD elements and place them wherever you like!

Are there still kinks to work out in the PC version of The Division? Yep, and at the top of that list is better SLI and CrossFire scaling. But I am genuinely happy to see Ubisoft putting more work into this port than the majority of other AAA developers lately, and I hope it continues.